The present invention relates generally to the field of animal waste containers and, more specifically, to disposable animal waste containers which are inexpensive to fabricate and easy to use.
There is a clear need for such a container since replacing cat litter, for example, is messy and malodorous and recent medical reports indicate that changing cat litter is particularly contraindicated for pregnant women.
A number of attempts have been made to provide such disposable animal waste containers but all suffer from major inadequacies. Silver et. al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,171,680) provides a packaged disposable animal waste container which is both complicated and expensive to fabricate since it contains a large number of discrete parts. Likewise, Wellman et. al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,271,787) provides a disposable container, with litter for animals, which suffers from a large number of component parts. S. Prucha (U.S. Pat. No. 3,745,975) provides a disposable pet relief structure in which the cover is not used as part of the litter box once the cover is removed and which requires a large number of fabrication steps. For a disposable litter box to be truly utilitarian its cost must be only slightly higher than the cost of litter in non-utilitarian containers such as plastic bags or paper sacks.